Selling Your Chrome Extension to The Devil

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It only took 1 hour for Amit Agarwal to create a Chrome Extention that serves as an alternative to Google Reader. When the extention hit 30000+ users, a person asked him to buy it for a four digit figure. A jackpot for Amit so he agreed.

But, here’s what happened next.

The extension was sold, they sent the money via PayPal and I transferred the ownership of the extension to a particular Google Account. It was a smooth transition.

A month later, the new owners of the Feedly extension pushed an update to the Chrome store. No, the update didn’t bring any new features to the table nor contained any bug fixes. Instead, they incorporated advertising into the extension.

These aren’t regular banner ads that you see on web pages, these are invisible ads that work the background and replace links on every website that you visit into affiliate links. In simple English, if the extension is activated in Chrome, it will inject adware into all web pages.